The Strange Case of Imran Awan

Only fraud or something more?

On July 25, Pakistani-American IT specialist Imran Awan was arrested at Dulles Airport for bank fraud while he was allegedly fleeing to Pakistan. The reports predictably produced some press coverage before the story died. Yet the speed at which the news vanished has prompted some observers to suggest that there might actually be something more to the disappearance than the operation of the normal media-reporting cycle. A number of conservative websites, including Breitbart, have been sounding the alarm over a possible cover-up that just might even be linked to what we are now calling Russiagate.

To be sure, the tale is a strange one with plenty of unsavory links. Thirty-seven-year-old Awan, as well as his wife and two brothers Abid and Jamal, worked as IT administrators for nearly 30 congressmen, all Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. They did not have security clearances and it is not even certain that they were in any way checked out before being hired. At one point, they brought into the House as a colleague one Rao Abbas, someone to whom they owed money and who might have had no qualifications at all to work IT. Abbas wound up working in the office of Rep. Patrick Murphy, who was at the time a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as for Rep. Theo Deutch. He was paid $250,000.

The process of granting security clearances to Congressional staff is not exactly transparent, but it is not unlike clearances for other government agencies. The office seeking the clearance for a staff member must put in a request, some kind of investigation follows, and the applicant must sign a non-disclosure agreement before the authorization is granted. Sometimes Congress pushes the process by demanding that its staff have access above and beyond the normal “need to know.” In March 2016, for example, eight Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee requested that their staffs be given access to top-secret sensitive compartmented information (SCI). It is not known if the Awans, who were working for several committee members, would have been involved, but Buzzfeed, in its initial reporting on the investigation of the Awans family, repeated the concerns of a congressman that the suspects might have “had access to the House of Representatives’ entire computer network.”

The Awans billed Congress for more than $4 million between 2004 and 2016, a sum that has been reported to be three or four times higher than the norm for government contractor IT specialists performing similar work. The considerable level of overbilling has not been explained by the congressmen involved. In spite of all that income, Imran Awan declared bankruptcy in 2010, claiming losses of $1 million on a car business that he owned in Falls Church, Va. The business was named Cars International A, abbreviated on its business cards as CIA.

As of February 2016, the Awans came under suspicion for having set up an operation to steal and resell government-owned computer equipment. It was also believed that they had somehow obtained access to House of Representatives’ computer databases as well as to other information in the internal computer system that they were not normally authorized to work on as part of their duties. The Capitol Hill Police began an investigation and quietly alerted the congressmen involved that there might be a problem. Most stopped employing the Awan family, but Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran on the payroll until the day after he was actually arrested.

Some of those defending the Awans, to include Wasserman-Schultz and the family lawyer, have insisted that he and his family were the victims of “an anti-Muslim, right-wing smear job,” though there is no actual evidence to suggest that is the case. They also claim that the bank fraud, in which he obtained a home equity loan for $165,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union based on a house that he owned and claimed to live in in Lorton, Va., was largely a misunderstanding; it was described by his lawyer Chris Gowen, a Clinton family confidant, as something that was “extremely minor.” It turned out that there was a tenant in the house, an ex-Marine and his Naval officer wife, who were very suspicious about a large quantity of what appeared to be government-sourced computer equipment and supplies, all material that had been left behind by the Awans. They contacted the FBI, which discovered hard drives that appeared to have been deliberately destroyed.

The FBI is certainly interested in the theft of government computers. But it is also looking into the possibility that the Awans were using their ability to access and possibly exploit sensitive information stored in the House of Representatives’ computer network, as well as through Wasserman-Schultz’s iPad, which Imran had access to and connected to the Democratic National Committee server. As Imran Awan was also a dual-national, born in Pakistan, the possibility of espionage also had to be considered. The charge that Awan was actually arrested on, bank fraud, was an easy way to hold him, as that aspect of his activities was well documented. It allows the other more serious investigations to continue, so the argument that Imran Awan is only being held over a minor matter is not necessarily correct.

Awans wired the credit union money to Pakistan, as part of a $283,000 transfer that was made in January. His wife Hina Alvi also left the U.S. two months later. She was searched by Customs officers and it was determined that she was carrying $12,000 in cash. She also had with her their three children, and numerous boxes containing household goods and clothing. It was clear that she did not intend to come back, but there has been no explanation why she was even allowed to leave, since carrying more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it is a felony.

As Imran Awan reportedly had access to Wasserman-Schultz’s iPad, he presumably also had access to the incriminating Hillary Clinton emails. He also used a laptop in her office that was, according to investigators, concealed in an “unused crevice” in the Rayburn House Office Building. It is being examined by police but Wasserman-Schultz tried strenuously to recover it before it could be looked at. She pressured the Chief of the Capitol Police Matthew Verderosa to return it, threatening him by saying “you should expect that there will be consequences.”

There is another odd connection of Imran Awan that goes back to the circle around prominent neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz during the Iraq War. In late 2002 and early 2003, Wolfowitz regularly met secretly with a group of Iraqi expatriates who resided in the Washington area and were opponents of the Saddam Hussein regime. The Iraqis had not been in their country of birth for many years but they claimed to have regular contact with well-informed family members and political allies. The Iraqi advisers provided Wolfowitz with a now-familiar refrain, i.e. that the Iraqi people would rise up to support invading Americans and overthrow the hated Saddam. They would greet their liberators with bouquets of flowers and shouts of joy.

The Iraqis were headed by one Dr. Ali A. al-Attar, born in Baghdad to Iranian parents in 1963, a 1989 graduate of the American University of Beirut Faculty of Medicine. He subsequently emigrated to the United States and set up a practice in internal medicine in Greenbelt, Md., a suburb of Washington D.C. Al-Attar eventually expanded his business to include nine practices that he wholly or partly owned in Virginia and Maryland but he eventually lost his license due to “questionable billing practices” as well as “unprofessional conduct” due to having sex with patients.

Al-Attar was investigated by the FBI and eventually indicted for large scale health care fraud in 2008-09. This included charging insurance companies more than $2.3 million for services their patients did not actually receive, with many of the false claims using names of diplomats and employees enrolled in a group plan at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. In one case, the doctors claimed an embassy employee visited three of their clinics every 26 days between May 2007 and August 2008 to have the same testing done each time. The insurance company paid the doctors $55,000 for more than 400 nonexistent procedures for the one patient alone.

Al-Attar fled the United States after the indictment to avoid arrest and imprisonment and is now considered a fugitive from justice. Late in 2012 he was observed in Beirut, Lebanon, conversing with a Hezbollah official. Al-Attar is of interest in this case because he appears to have been a friend of Imran Awan and also loaned him $100,000, which was never repaid. The FBI is currently looking into any possible espionage involving the two men as Awan and his associates clearly had access to classified information while working in the House of Representatives.

The Imran Awan case is certainly of considerable interest not only for what the investigation eventually turns up but also for what it reveals about how things work in Congress. One might well ask how foreign-born IT specialists are selected and vetted prior to being significantly overpaid and allowed to work on computers in congressional offices. And the ability of those same individuals to keep working even after the relevant congressmen have been warned that their employee was under investigation has to be explained beyond Wasserman-Schultz’s comment that Awan had not committed any crime. And how does “bankrupt” Imran Awan wind up with a high-priced lawyer to defend him who is associated with the Clintons? Finally, there are the lingering concerns about the unfortunately well-established Russiagate narrative. Did the Russians really hack into the DNC, or was it some kind of inside job carried out by someone actually working for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for reasons that have yet to be determined, possibly to include espionage? There are many questions—and so far, few answers.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

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39 Responses to The Strange Case of Imran Awan

One of the corporate scams I uncovered as a new IT Director at a Fortune 500 company, was one in which equipment would be ordered for the company and paid for, but then sold to parties outside by the perpetrators. Sometimes those involved were quite high up the corporate food chain. Such schemes would work even more easily in certain government agencies which have even poorer financial reporting and oversight or undisclosed budgets.

There really isn’t a happy ending for the honest whistleblowers in such cases, corporate or governmental, since the dishonest players are not only well-connected, but those in charge have too often also been ethically compromised by indirect financial benefit from the schemes.

Hannity has been pushing this story like he thinks it’s the smoking gun that will send Hillary Clinton to jail for the rest of her life. It would be supremely ironic if it turns out to be an important link in the Trump-Russia-DNC relationship that he claims is just anti-Trump media fake news. After all, without FNC pushing this story so hard I never would have heard about it.

So, I am a computer programmer (actually, Applications Developer according to my employer) who has been working in the field for over 20 years who has never worked for the government, but…

$4 million over 12 years for 4 people comes to $83,333 a year each.

Supposedly this is “three or four times higher than the norm for government contractor IT specialists performing similar work”, which means that that according to the best case scenario for them the average contractor earns $27,777.

Assuming 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year (and the article provides no information on how many hours a year all of them worked, what their specialty is, and how good they are at it, all of which can make an incredible difference in how much they should make), that comes to $13.35 an hour for the average government IT contractor. This is in the highest salary, highest living expenses city in the country to live, and with no benefits as a contractor, having to pay their own health, dental, vision and no 401K.

Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like this family was into some bad stuff, this has been known for a long time by everyone, and everyone but DWS got clear of them a long time ago.

As a generally pretty liberal person (who was quite conservative until GWB’s push to war in Iraq made me re-evaluate all of my political beliefs and realize that all of the things I had taken in theory as facts actually worked out in reality as much less than fact), I consider DWS to be at best a wart on the butt of the democratic party.

If these numbers are correct, then it completely makes sense. IT contractors who should be making upwards of $150 an hour working for $40 an hour? Of course they would have some nefarious motivation to do so.

The Awans were not contractors, they were employees if the House of Representatives. They didn’t “bill” anyone for $4million dollars. But each of them were paid roughly $160k per year — a nice salary, but solidly lower middle class in DC. And the fraud charge IS minor. So you got a HELOC opened against a house you owned but didn’t live in full time? Happens a lot. Should probably happen more. Everything else is just a riff on the fact that he is a Muslim who knows muslims, some of whom live in Pakistan. I can’t believe I agree with Debbie Wasserman Schutz.

As suspected the fire is not were the smoke is. I suspect the “collusion story” is one of misdirection.

Th press and Congress apparently either unwilling or unable to distinguish smoke from flame are more than happy to avoid anything that makes a case against them. I heard bits and pieces of this story on Chris Plank(?) radio program. It’s hard to trust a Congress that avoids its own issue.

The big Republican stories;

1. Congressman Flake’s call to reign in the executive. All of the issues that concern the everyday lives of US citizens and s it turns out one of them is managing the WH — you have got to be kidding. Apparently, members of Congress and others have been hoodwinked by what appears be a grifting operation that may include spying and the big news story is Congressional republicans reigning the executive. Maybe they should look at reigning in themselves. It’s been seven years of claims to repeal the healthcare legislation —

2. Having spent millions of dollars investigating — actual collusion to undermine the US – not an iota of evidence.

3. There’s a new proposal coming to on immigration. RAISE proposal which on its face sounds nice, but has that curious taste of elitism about it. I find this business of the best and the brightest foreigner immigration idea unhelpful to the skilled workers of US citizens. Who also get undermined by skilled best and brightest foreign labor.

4. The two largest providers of drugs making headlines opioids, and cocaine continue to dominate the news cycle: China and Mexico.

Certainly all of these issues have weight to US security and Intel concerns, but what is more apparent is that Congress is unwilling to take on their own issues of integrity credibility. All the collusion appears to be among house members. Whether its contractors or lobbyists agitating for war, There’s really a problem in Congress about policing themselves. I remember when it looked the CIA had turned the tables on members of congress and how they had conniption fits. I am beginning to wonder, just how dysfunctional has the congressional body become.More and more it looks like Congress avoiding accountability, whether it’s their support for needless sanctions (more political point making than policy) – or the mess of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan

In my view, their avoidance is an indication of just how wrong headed or blind the establishment is to their own failings.

“One might well ask how foreign-born IT specialists are selected and vetted prior to being significantly overpaid and allowed to work on computers in congressional offices. “

Indeed. In fact, one should ask why “foreign-born IT specialists” are allowed to work for our government. There are plenty of native-born Americans with the expertise to do this sort of work. There are plenty of native born Americans who NEED this work. And the native-born Americans don’t bring all this weird and suspicious baggage with them.

These Awan characters appear to be incompetent, even stupid. Nonetheless, they were able to hack the US Congress, and the US law enforcement allowed half of them to leave the country and get away scot-free.

Can you imagine what smart, competent spies and traitors are getting away with?

In fact, one should ask why “foreign-born IT specialists” are allowed to work for our government.

I know ar least two foreign-born IT specialists who work for the federal government. One is Russian. On Pakastani. Both are citizens. My husband, also Russian-born, worked in the IT industry for 20-plus years. Well over half of his colleagues were foreign-born. It’s not because they were paid less so that they were undermining American-born programmers. If the feds do proper security clearances, where a legal immigrant who has been granted citizenship shouldn’t matter.

Dear Phil: Have allways had respect and admiration for your articles. But this one is on thin ice.I hope u have not joined the ranks of the “conspiracy theorists” and get back to matters u really know about.

A lot of people “deliberately destroy” their abandoned hard drives. And I recommend anyone do so unless they really trust the government not to manufacture a case against them.

Al-Attar’s insurance fraud, at least by Miami standards, is pretty much nickels and dimes and at at least didn’t include bilking Medicare.

So far (famous last words) this doesn’t sound like much more than the usual malfeasance described by Fran M. above. I could give a few examples from my career in academia. And local governments are rife such.

“As a generally pretty liberal person (who was quite conservative until GWB’s push to war in Iraq made me re-evaluate all of my political beliefs”

Many do not consider GWB to be a conservative. He did run with culture-wars conservative branding, but that’s after decades of heavy drinking and perhaps other party drugs. More significantly, his disastrous Iraq blunder was arguably Wilsonian, not conservative.
Conservatism includes the notion that human nature is not naturally good and that placing a society in a paint shaker and carefully (or not carefully, in this case) pouring out the newly ‘improved’ contents does not result in a tasty delight.

Conservatism, at least in theory, also doesn’t include idiocy. Decapitating the ruling clique from a bit of land which comprises three factions of inherent hostility bound together by a necessarily brutal minority (Kurds, Sunni, and the Shia majority) was going to do what exactly?
Bush appointed Paul Bremer, a desk guy with zero military or political experience, to run the place. Bremer, a bureaucrat, dismissed the Baath military, and prohibited them from having any government jobs, which effectively meant they had no jobs. But of course he did not round up each and every rifle, grenade and drum of ammonium nitrate, that’s impossible.
So now there’s a professional, unemployed and bitter military who are members of a hated minority.
I ain’t even a pee-aych-dee and I know that much. Seems like Bush and the leftover ‘smart people’ he hired knew even less.

Four people assumed full-time over twelve years is 48 person-years. $4 million/48 is about $83,000/person-year. Might be a little high, but absolutely, certainly not 3-4 times the norm for a government contractor. Philip, you started off on the wrong foot.

Great Article!
Reminds me of the Pagliano Platt River Sub contractor who was indicted after Running a mortgage fraud scheme, fixing loans with clients kids social security numbers. see pdf..fascinating how scammers workhttp://freebeacon.com/politics/clintons-email-server-firm-scrubs-data-disposal-references-from-website/http://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/YAindictment.pdf
The connection to companies getting cars then shipping them out..to perhaps bogus buyers..or selling to folx that dont have proper traceable Ids is therefore not a an improbable stretch. The same rings can be used as conduits for drugs and weapons.
That the spouse left with 12k 2k above legal limit..indicates prior approval..and for this to be happening over such a long period of time under the noses of 17 intelligence agencies for 13 years..lets say to be nice…5 years..is beyond the pale.
If a loan is not repaid..than IRS will gingerly declare it income..and if one owes more than 50k in taxes..one can’t leave the country under recent laws enacted..selling all those houses..certainly involved some capital gain..If not Congress..then The IRS should be all over this..like they did Al Capone..

We let foreigners in. For reasons unknown we then let the foreigners work for the government, something that would probably happen in no other country except the US. Still later, we are shocked and surprised that the the foreigners we let in got jobs inside our government, and we’re shocked and surprised that they turn out to be working for foreign countries, terror groups, organized crime, whatever.

And of course we’re angry at the native-born Americans who complain that they should have had those government jobs that the Democrats gave to the foreigners.

Can anybody explain to me why it isn’t against the law (with very rare exceptions) for foreigners or foreign-born to have government jobs?

Sadly, the Awans’ hacking of the US Congress is only a “strange” case insofar as similar cases rarely get this kind of scrutiny. The level of corruption and national security threats involving “foreign contractors” in DC is incredible.

I had said it many times before, Russiagate is a diversion. Comey had lined the dots. There is no way that awan could have gotten the IT position without the Mossads approval. Who were the contractors who filled in for the no shows? What is awans educational background; his qualifications? I don’t for a second believe the wasserman shultz would allow herself to be blackmailed; most likely the other way around, if blackmail was a factor. It is interesting that he was not fired until after his arrest. Was this to allow him the use of his position to escape the country? This certainly would show collusion with wasserman shultz. Pollard comes to mind. I could be all wrong, but I can’t help but wonder.

Like a lot of other people in DC, the Awans were expecting a very big Pay Day after a Hillary victory.

Then it didn’t happen. The “sure thing” – Hillary’s inevitable win over Trump – didn’t happen. A lot of commitments of the “just wait until after the election” kind suddenly couldn’t be fulfilled, and crooks like the Awans who were expecting great things are suddenly looking at bankruptcy and “powerful friends” who are no longer powerful. Debtors close in. Maybe foreign intelligence agents start squeezing them. The Awans start to realize that maybe all that Congressional data they were given access to might be worth real money, maybe a straight sale to a foreign government, maybe blackmailing individual Congressmen, whatever works.

The Awans are almost certainly just a small sample of the kind of corruption likely to come to light now that the Clinton Machine is no longer wealthy or powerful enough to keep it hidden (and to keep mouths shut). So this type of story is bound to be repeated quite a lot over the next few years.

Also, these employees made $160,000 a year: including a 20 year old whose last job was at McDonalds. They had 12 nice homes in the area -bought through Congressional bank, along with 22 businesses I’ve found so far.

@WhereWasLawEnforcement? In fact, one should ask why “foreign-born IT specialists” are allowed to work for our government. There are plenty of native-born Americans with the expertise to do this sort of work. There are plenty of native born Americans who NEED this work. And the native-born Americans don’t bring all this weird and suspicious baggage with them.

But Democratic leaders like Wasserman-Schultz or Chuck Schumer don’t like or trust native-born Americans. The Democratic leadership wants to replace native-born American workers with cheaper, more obedient foreign labor. That swells the Democratic vote and keeps Wall Street donations flowing to Democrats.

Too many politicians are hiring Pakistanis, Indians, Israelis, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans, many of them hiding behind so-called “dual citizenship”. They’re stealing jobs from Americans and making it easy for foreign governments and foreign criminals to hack our government systems.

Setting aside the possible financial crimes, blackmail, etc, how can our government claim to be serious about cyber-security when it lets “foreign-born IT experts” use US government computers and systems? It isn’t 1995. It’s 2017. We know how these foreign spies and criminals operate. How is it possible that anyone with a foreign background is permitted anywhere near a US government computer?

Stories like this have become all too familiar. People with names that sound like they come from almost anywhere except America involved in some damn mess with some corrupt damn Washington politicians.

This is an interesting story, but right now it still reads a bit like a conspiracy theory: too much circumstantial evidence and inferences regarding what is undoubtedly suspicious behaviour. I hope you continue to report on it as it progresses though.

A few other points.

– $4 million dollars for four specialist IT contactors over a 12 year period actually doesn’t work out to be a huge amount: just over $80,000 dollars per year, per person. That’s a real bargain for a good IT contractor.

– “hard drives that appeared to have been deliberately destroyed”. Not unheard of amongst the cyber security conscious.

– Lastly “the incriminating Hillary Clinton emails”. Except they weren’t incriminating were they? Or at least according to the FBI not sufficiently so to press charges. We could discuss the potentially incriminating nature of the deleted emails, but then we’re back to evidence-less conspiracy based on inferences from suspicious behaviour.

It doesn’t seem likely that Awan would have leaked his employers emails to Wikileaks. It seems far more likely that Awan fingered Seth Rich for the leak, and even seems plausible that Awan may have been involved in the revenge murder of Seth Rich.

But Democratic leaders like Wasserman-Schultz or Chuck Schumer don’t like or trust native-born Americans. The Democratic leadership wants to replace native-born American workers with cheaper, more obedient foreign labor.

So kinda like Trump, then, who employs mostly foreigners brought over on H2B visas to staff Mar-A-Lago. His adminustration expanded the H1B program by 15,000 slots this year, and Trump wanted 76 of them for his resort.

Several commenters have knocked my math skills re the salaries the Awans received. They assume that all four Awans (actually five – three brothers and two wives) worked all twelve years that the Awans were active on the Hill. They did not. Only Imran worked all 12 years – the others worked less. The publicly available salary records for all the Awans reveal that they earned a total of $4 million paid at the senior end of the scale for employees at ca. $160,000 per year. Several of the links I provided break down the income in more detail.

I would also note to skeptics about this story that I too am not totally convinced about it in every detail but the one element that I find to be both inexplicable and very suggestive of a cover-up is the Awan lawyer Chris Gowen – how does a blue chip Clinton lawyer wind up defending this guy over a false document in a case of bank fraud? He is the one element that screams out that something is very, very wrong here.

Phil, How does a blue chip lawyer wind up defending this guy? How did a bankrupt Simpson get a dream team of attorneys to defend him?
Why didn’t you publish the exact amounts paid to the whole Awan family over the duration?
Why aren’t corrupt American officials arrested for squandering Billions (with a B) of our hard earned money in Afghanistan, Iraq and a host of other countries?
What about the Kushner family selling green cards to the Chinese or having the zoning changed for their properties or Clinton accepting huge sums of money from the Saudis whom she has called the biggest backers of terrorism?

“So kinda like Trump, then, who employs mostly foreigners brought over on H2B visas to staff Mar-A-Lago. His adminustration expanded the H1B program by 15,000 slots this year, and Trump wanted 76 of them for his resort.”

Yes, Trump looks to be as corrupt and self-dealing as the Democrats. Still, so far I haven’t seen him do anything quite so bizarre as hire a Pakistani crime family to run the Congress’s computers.

Why would uber-Zionist Wasserman-Schultz hire, provide access to intelligence and defend a Muslim from the nation that has the Islamic Bomb? It offends commonsense. Could it be that the Awans are double or triple agents? There is a long history of collaboration between Pakistan’s ISI and israel’s Mossad.http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/pakistans-military…
The possibility of Awan being part of a feeder network to Israeli Intel should be explored. Wasserman-Schultz and the lügenpresse’s subservience to all things Israeli would seem to be a better explanation than to either’s fondness for anything Pakistani.